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CowboyRobot writes "In Paul Vixie's latest essay, he argues that the alternative to the Whois registry model is flawed and that we should be learning from the mistakes of the history of proposed alternatives to the DNS. 'Any proposal for a competing Whois registry model is as doomed by design and destiny as every alternative DNS system. Even if it succeeds at first, it would fail after copycatting occurred.'"

No it didn't. Everything in the internet is designed to be distributed. There is no reason why you can't have multiple DNS trees. If one maps aaa.example.com to 192.168.0.1 and the other maps it to 192.222.0.1 nothing breaks. They are just different namespaces. Go ahead and yell and scream that every domain must map to one and only one IP but the truth is that it doesn't. The internet would still function, just differently then some people expect it to. Obviously if I want to follow a link on your web page then I need to follow it in your namespace, but that's an implementation detail.

ISPs already know that multiple namespaces don't break anything. Why do you think they're all cashing in on NXDOMAIN pages?

Many companies do split horizon DNS. Internal address lookups give different views than external ones, and sometimes the same domain has different addresses.

So if an alternate DNS shows up that returns the same results as the ICANN DNS except it doesn't block access to sites that the US Gov doesn't like, then what's the problem? And if it creates a new TLD and sells addresses for half the cost of the.com addresses, what's the problem with that? People using the legacy DNS won't see the blocked addresses or the new addresses, but nothing bad happens to them.

Yes, it did have to be said. That's what top-down hierarchical naming systems are for, and why they work, in spite of early arguments like Pike&Weinberger's The Hideous Name article on Plan9's locally-based namespace, and Peter Honeyman's pathalias work that made uucp bang-paths much more scalable back when we used those, and my general anarchist ranting about not wanting to let some bunch of bureaucrats decide what I'm going to call my computers. ISPs do mostly know that multiple namespaces break th

Another reason that you can't have multiple DNS trees is that DNS contains a mechanism for fixing that - if you've got your DNS tree with aaa.example.com and Eugene has his aaa.example.com, you can both be replaced by a very small shell script that turns yours into aaa.example.com.smallpond.altroots.net and his into aaa.example.com.kashpureff.altroots.net, and suddenly you've been assimilated and there's just one namespace again.

This isn't a mechanism for "fixing" anything. It is a mechanism for demonstrating exactly what I said, that multiple DNS trees can coexist on the internet.

Users want namespaces that point them to the correct place, so that somebody can say "I'm at thisdomain.com" and anybody in the world can use it, and "users" includes both the owners of the name and people using that name to retrieve content.

The correct place? You've drunk the kool-aid. Maybe you also buy star names from the International Star Registry. Of course if I want anyone in the world to connect to my domain using the "One, True, Correct, Canonical Name" then that name has to be in every nameserver. Now please tell me how I get to the domains that have been pulled out of the ICAN

There's certainly room in the Marketplace of Ideas for namespaces that work in ways other than hierarchies controlled by the Trademark Gods. Also, DNS is both a namespace and a delivery system for that namespace runnning on a distributed set of name servers - it's possible to run the delivery system of DNS in many different ways, and in fact we've seen a transition of most of the upper levels from conventionally-routed IP to anycast, and a wide range of different kinds of servers people use for their subdo

It's not that big of a concern, and that's the real reason any alternate DNS system is doomed to fail. Vixie's concerns with copycatting and whatnot may be justified, but the simple fact is the current system isn't painful enough for most people, even most network admins, to go to the trouble to switch to something different. Hell, IPv6 has been a standard for 15 years, and hardly anyone uses it. Sure, we'll all switch eventually when the pain of staying with IPv4 is greater than the pain of switching to IPv6. Similarly, if the pain of staying with the current whois system ever gets great enough to contemplate switching, people will do so. I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future, though.

Hell, IPv6 has been a standard for 15 years, and hardly anyone uses it.

But we can't deploy standards, only implementations.

Windows 7, OSX Lion, and Fedora 16 [fedoraproject.org] will all handle IPv6 properly. Previous versions all have certain problems that need workarounds, and it's probably not worthwhile for most users if there are corner cases to worry about. And if you're not on an expensive commercial Internet pipe, you can't even get IPv6, except in limited trial locations for the big ISP's.

When Windows 7 is where Windows XP is now, people will move over. But, hey, we've reached a real milestone where now it's all possible, so, yay 2011.

I didn't find the article convincing either. Many assertions, few pieces of evidence. May as well argue that assigning driver license numbers to people can't possibly work unless a single controlling assigner keeps order.

Seems there's a lot of dogma in the thinking of how the Internet should be managed. For instance, we could make another Internet. Instantly double the number of IPv4 addresses, since every address could be used twice. We could find some bit somewhere that we can use to distinguish th

Seems there's a lot of dogma in the thinking of how the Internet should be managed. For instance, we could make another Internet. Instantly double the number of IPv4 addresses, since every address could be used twice. We could find some bit somewhere that we can use to distinguish them, allowing communication between the 2 Internets. Does such a proposition sound like heresy?

It sounds a lot more like fantasy / magic than like heresy. As in "assign the same IP to two NICs and hope that the packets reach the

You can't have a distributed system that creates an unique and arbitrary resource without cooperation between the peers. Without communication among them there will be duplication. People that think it is possible are fools.

But if you're using PGP for Internet email, then you're also "cooperating" with other PGP users when you rely DNS' central authority to establish the domain name part of your email address, to build your overall PGP identity. That's the "key" (in the database sense) to the "key" (in the crypto sense).

He also wrote BIND, which had one of the most breathtakingly awful security records of any single piece of software for many years (the years during which he was the primary author, oddly enough). For a while there, it seemed CERT was issuing advisories for some new vulnerability in BIND that would grant root access to your entire network on a daily basis.

You can say that about almost any software written in that time frame; security was not as high a priority back then when memory, disk, network and cpu limitations meant making real world efforts to get software working at all. And adding security into a complex product after the fact is EXTREMELY difficult compared to starting fresh.

I'll be amused to see your business model and your adoption rate, and your plan for making it useful for some people before convincing everybody in the world to adopt it, and your plan for dealing with privacy and spam and identity theft and spam and with people who have multiple email addresses and multiple phones and one-use email addresses to avoid spammers, and....

And if you do manage to sell any significant number of users on wanting it, somebody's quickly going to decide to create the domain iids.com

The argument misunderstands trust; that we can only trust a single system, and we must trust it completely.

Let's assume for the purposes of argument, however, that an alternative Whois system is created and enough network operators trust it that this alternative system becomes operationally relevant and that a non-RIR resource transfer regime becomes practical. Does anybody really believe that there would be only one alternative Whois system—no copycatting? Or as in the case of alternative DNS described earlier, would not the number of potential alternative Whois systems be limited only by available capital?

(emphasis added) Duplicate systems can contain differing information, and be trusted at different levels. People do this all the time. The author's unstated premise is that the goal is 'a definitive, trusted, answer' and not some variable level of trust (or confidence) in the answer. Think Encyclopedia Britannica; not Wikipedia.

Inevitably, however, the same network would appear to be registered to different operators in different Whois systems since freedom from transfer limitations is the stated reason for the very existence of the alternative systems.

Do we trust a top-down, hierarchical system controlled by a single entit

The author's unstated premise is that the goal is 'a definitive, trusted, answer' and not some variable level of trust (or confidence) in the answer.

Vixie didn't phrase it that way, but he didn't exactly gloss over it either. One of the things I like about the article is that he's quite explicit that he's working under the constraint that whois and DNS must be universal -- that a query must return the same result no matter where or who you are.

Rather than just sitting back and watch as ICANN allows the demands of money to corrode an essential function of the network DNS root operators can coordinate using their leverage to effect change to ICANN and its governance.

IP addresses of the root servers to bootstrap the entire system are configured in countless millions DNS servers. What is ICANN going to do send out a memo asking the entire network to please update their root list?

There are solutions to ICANN which do not involve fragmenting the syste

I have long held that competing DNS root systems *can* work - and in fact have been working for long time.

The issue is not whether there is one singular catholic DNS root, but rather the degree of consistency between competing roots.

We all accept that internet users dislike surprise - they will not like any DNS root that give surprising (or misleading or fraudulent answers). That's why any DNS root that gives surprising DNS answers will quickly be shunned.

I don't think many people are getting the point of this article, although I admit it is a bit confusing. While it is true that the article talks about alternative DNS systems and WHOIS; what Paul really seems concerned about is the part of the WHOIS system used to look up who is currently allowed to use a given IP address range, and is responsible for activity originating from it.

The current authorities which run this part of the WHOIS system have rules and restrictions about how and why IP address blocks on the Internet can be assigned from one party to another. Among the things cited by the article which currently are not permitted are obtaining IP address for perceived future needs when you have not already exhausted what you have, or simply buying IP addresses for no use at all speculating they can be sold for more money later.

Some parties do not like these rules, and want to establish their own system for buying and selling IP addresses which is not subject to the rules currently in place. They could kind-of do this right now, but the transfer of ownership would not be recorded in the old system.

This is potentially a bad thing, as suppose someone attacks you from IP address 1.2.3.4. And for some reason, reverse DNS on that IP address fails to work. If there is more than one system tracking ownership of who currently has the right to use this IP address, how do you find the right administrator to contact? And what if someone updated their contact information or the fact the IP block had been sold in one system, but forgot to do so in another?

This is potentially a bad thing, as suppose someone attacks you from IP address 1.2.3.4. And for some reason, reverse DNS on that IP address fails to work. If there is more than one system tracking ownership of who currently has the right to use this IP address, how do you find the right administrator to contact? And what if someone updated their contact information or the fact the IP block had been sold in one system, but forgot to do so in another?

There is another layer that is not discussed in TFA that uses whois and routing announcements to help verify routing. Routing databases like RADB are required by most BGP transit providers and all peering exchanges will use something like peerdb.com to help track their members too. The transit providers like to know where to send the bill for the bandwidth used by an IP block and peering exchanges like to enforce their rules. IP blocks are assigned to people and companies that can change locations and provi

From such a well respected author, the suggestion that some competition should be classed as arrogance comes as a surprise to say the least. The world is no longer a Pangaea; it fragmented a long time ago. The one stop shop Pangaea has become a group of competing countries all with various agenda, all contactable using the same telephone numbers, but of course via different country codes. The DNS is following the same path. Competition is to be expected, yet the aim is not always to smash the opponent.